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in reply to /usr/people/flexion

Surprised to see that even then there were already transparent terminal windows.
in reply to Frehi

That's IRIX, not Unix v4. Not sure how it was implemented on that OS, but likely the way we rocked "transparent" terminals in Linux in the early 2000s: the terminal looked at the part of the root window (a.k.a. "desktop") it was over, copied the bitmap corresponding to the region of the root window it was covering, tinted it, and used it as the background for the terminal.

So, as long as there were no other windows beneath the terminal, it looked transparent. It lagged a little bit, because it had to constantly yank the root window bitmap, but it worked.

But as soon as you had another window beneath the terminal, it "punched through" that window and ruined the illusion.

IIRC, urxvt and maybe Eterm still have that option today. I used it as recently as 2021-2.

Clarification: the terminal is IRIX's. What it's displaying is Unix "V4"

This entry was edited (1 week ago)

JdeBP reshared this.

in reply to /usr/people/flexion

The people workin on that tape are just amazing. It were found days ago and now it's running. Awesome.
in reply to John Rohde Jensen

crazy what can be achieved when you combine nerd forces in an enclosed space for a short while.

Basically this on steroids I guess xkcd.com/356/

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to /usr/people/flexion

Is IRIX running on an actual Silicon Graphics machine, or is it also emulated?
in reply to Michael Engel

@johndoe99077

Aficionados will remember /vmunix for #Unix with demand paged virtual memory.

To this day, the #OpenBSD and #NetBSD kernels likewise live in single files in the root directory.

man.netbsd.org/boot.8#FILES

@me_ @flexion